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| This is President Gurunath Meiyappan |
Indian Cricket has been rife with nepotism in recent times
and we fans tolerated this as long as the team was being improved and the
emphasis was on development, but as with any case of favoritism in such
matters, this has come back to bite the BCCI. Mr. Srinivasan, the head of CSK’s
parent company-India Cements, installed his son-in-law Mr. Meiyappan as CSK’s
team principal and when he was arrested, denied that Meiyappan was the head of
CSK and insinuated instead that he was simply a highly enthusiastic Cricket fan
who travelled with the team. This was proved false by the Mudgal Report,
compiled by an independent, Indian Supreme Court directed panel, which
reaffirms what we fans already knew- that Meiyappan was indeed the principal of
CSK and that he was definitely involved in betting and passing over
confidential team information to bookies.
A known, yet, disheartening confirmation, this threatens the
credibility of CSK’s performances over IPL’s 6 year history and recent reports
surfacing in the press threaten to compound the misery being piled on CSK, its
supporters and the Indian Cricket community as a whole. There have been
murmurings in the smaller press circles that the initial investigator of the
scandal, IPS officer Sampath Kumar, has named the Indian Cricket team Captain M
S Dhoni and several other players as being involved in the scandal and has
submitted a report to that nature to the SC panel investigating the case. If
Dhoni’s alleged connections happen to be proven true, then the reputation of
the national team and the BCCI will take a huge hit and India’s most successful
captain would face a permanent ban from the sport and will have to bow out of
the game in disgrace.
However, a twist in the story appeared last week when Officer
Kumar was suspended following directions from Crime Branch- Criminal
Investigation Department (CB-CID) of the Indian Police. The reason for the
suspension appears to be a case of accepting a Rs. 5.3 million ($ 88,000
approx.) bribe from a bookie to not name him in his report. CB-CID sources have
said that Officer Kumar has since turned over Rs. 3 million ($ 50,000 approx.)
to the CID. While this puts his report’s credibility into question, it should
not be forgotten that it was this report that exposed the entire scandal in the
first place and investigations based on this report led to the arrests of a
number of bookies culminating in Meiyappan’s arrest.
As a fan of Indian Cricket and CSK, I hope that Dhoni is not
involved and that CSK would not be dismissed from the league due to the avarice
of one man. It very well maybe the case that come next year’s World Cup and
IPL, we will see the absence of India’s most successful captain and its most
successful franchise.
-By Ajay Venkataraman
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